Using bones, Williams frames a place for mirrored windows and unobstructed doorways where love can come and go as it pleases. The rooms, in this collection, are floor-less, so photographs, clocks, bedroom walls and the staircase defy gravity. There is a haunting quality in this collection which makes you want to walk back into the room that you just left and search for what it is you may have missed.
—Rebecca Schumejda
In a universe written in the forms of questions, John Sibley Williams strums his fingers along finely tuned blends of thoughts and images. Enter the intimate conversations of these poems, but do not expect easy ways out. Watch out for the openings that will land you on the map of your own astonishment.
—Daniela Elza
John Sibley Williams pares down and removes the extraneous to expose what is absolutely needed: the possibilities. He bravely turns language over on its side and we are left with how things could fit back together in unexpected and elegant turns. The poems in this book repeatedly draw you to a stop with stunning insights, which will hold you long after you have put it down.
—Bonnie Nish
John Sibley Williams' poems are open-ended equations without solvable components. Bleeding, blindness, the absorption of self into the world, problems of identity and continuity, the incongruity of memory and anticipation create "controlled hallucinations" that probe our existence by suspending the coordinates normally associated with the articulation of one's reality. There is a great deal for the heart in these poems. These are skillfully composed black and white photographs, painstakingly hand tinted.
—Andrea Moorhead
“poetry of transparent mystery”
— Oregon Poetry Association
“Whitmanesque...with a dark tincture of Romantic irony.”
— Offcourse Literary Journal
“With a style sleek and spare, he also offers thoughtful, musical, and generous verse to gently challenge the reader to take charge of all of poetry.”
— Apalachee Review
“These poems make you think like a David Lynch movie or a Remedios Varo painting.”
— Driftless Area Review
“a collection of questions, interiors, and barriers”
— Cleaver Magazine
“A bare ghostly work of vision. It is a work of negative space, a work of spare words, a work of economical images, and a work of ache.”
— Broadkill Review
“graceful lines and striking imaginings of the many ways in which a person can navigate relationships with others and with the world outside one’s self.”
— Cactus Heart